Garnet's thoughts on Sparrow's Wing

"Scott Alarik at The Boston Globe once astutely observed that without having worked for 10 years developing a signature sound with Stan, I was forced to find a different style of writing after his death. To continue in that style we developed together might have been perceived as opportunistic or simply lazy. I had to find some other way to write while others, perhaps opportunistic themselves, stepped in to claim that sound as their own. It was frustrating to watch, but at the same time I was making slow steps towards another sound, another voice and a somewhat different way of expressing thoughts in song.
By the time I wrote the songs on Night Drive, I realized that I'd been skirting the issues of aging, loss and love (i.e. the big stuff) in my writing. If I did address the issues at all, it was in an oblique way, and I did my best to cover my tracks and eradicate any connection to myself.
But writing Golden Fields and Night Drive addressed clearly and in a direct way my own personal sense of loss and the passage of time since the loss of my brother and my best friend. And the recording of the song, Night Drive, as well as playing it every night was a kind of cleansing or catharsis.
For over a year, I wrote nothing, feeling pretty much at times that I'd finally said my piece and exorcised a few demons in the process.
So again, I felt I had to find a new way to write, and a different sound. I couldn't simply repeat what I'd just done. And having, at least in my own mind, publicly reclaimed my connection with Stan (there being so many fans who came to his music after his death that some don't know that we played together), I found myself writing about the Maritimes and drifting back to the elements of the sound we created together 25 years ago - my own sound.
I've come to recognize over the years that the writing process for me is one of trying to make sense of my life, of what goes on in the world around me. But the songs on "Sparrow's Wing" are for the most part, far more personal and revelatory than what I've written in the past.
-Garnet Rogers